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AdairRoblesUrrutia
Apr '21

Hi everyone I'd like to get some feedback on my Novel descriptions. Please let me know in the comments how interested you are to read these stories on a scale from 1-10? And let me know also what I can do to improve the descriptions.

1ST NOVEL DESCRIPTION
2 classmates go through their own different stories of growth during middle school and high school, which parallel each other through the years,

One: A troubled youth in high school goes on an epic revenge spree against the students and staff who had teased and wronged him, which in turn causes the students and staff members to seek revenge against him. While also having to deal with his older sister who constantly makes things worse for him at the worst possible times.

The other: a girl struggling to deal with her fears and pressures of life during and after high school, resorts to doing dark and terrible things to students in her school for her own amusement, which causes her to face the horrifying consequences of her actions and forces her to learn how to accept and take responsibility for her actions/mistakes and decide to become a better person.

4 years after high school, The victims of both of their past actions come back to haunt them when they are forced to be quarantined together at their former middle school. Where they will have to deal with them, their families and the people from their town for 2 weeks.

Will they be able to cohabitate peacefully or will they be embroiled in a violent altercation that could result in horrible consequences for both parties?

Third Person Narrative Coming Of Age characters with tragic backstories, angsty teens, growing up, parents, puberty, bullying, sibling relationships, middle school, high school, best friends, sports, sabotage, crushes, embarrassment, revenge, grudges, violence, friendships, crimes, police, family relationships, guns, knives, lies, deception, deceit, betrayal, trust, blood,

Similar Stories:
(Some of these stories may be less similar than others, but most have overlapping content and themes.)
It by Stephen King
Stand By Me
The Flowers Of Evil (Aku No Hana) Manga
Breaking Bad
13 Reasons Why
Perks Of Being A Wall Flower
Welcome to the NHK
Darkly Dreaming Dexter
Catcher in the Rye

newadult #YA #Youngadult #Darkthemes #Adultthemes #highschool #school #Realistic #Contemporary #Comingofage #Standalone #Violence #Stronglanguage #Exlicitlanguage #Druguse #Drama #Sliceoflife #Romance #Action #StrongFemalelead #Strongmalelead #Schoollife #melancholy #Teenangst #puberty

2ND NOVEL DESCRIPTION
In a post apocalyptic flooded world where everyone lives on large Navy Aircraft Carrier ships huddled together forming a city,

A 10 year old boy named Rafael who dreams of finding land has the course of his life changed when he finds a message in a bottle containing information about a newly discovered island, and over the course of 20 years he spends his life searching for a way to get to the island with the help of his best friends Adriana and Julieta.

Meanwhile as Rafael searches for a way to look for the island, two Police Detectives investigate a series of unsolved crimes and murders around the city spanning a decade, that may or may not be linked to Rafael and his friends.

Will Rafael and is friends be able to find the island and overthrow the tyrannical Government or will the Police Officers end up stopping them?

If you like characters with dark/tragic backstories you’ll find that here. Along with: Sibling relationships, parents, revenge, multiple main characters, best friends, coming of age, detective work, crimes, police, Tyrannical Government, Dystopian, Violence, Murder, mystery, manipulation, grudges, guns, knives, lies, deception, deceit, slavery, freedom, betrayal, trust, blood,

Similar Stories:
(Some of these stories may be less similar than others, i.e. no fantasy elements, but they have overlapping content and themes.)
Hunger Games
Snowpiercer
Divergent
Attack On Titan
Lord Of The Flies
Battle Royale
Harry Potter
Avatar The Last Airbender
1984
The Mazerunner

Dystopian #SciFi #Drama #YA # #Postapocalptic #Futuristic #Youngadult #Darkthemes #Adultthemes #Comingofage #mystery #Series

3RD NOVEL DESCRIPTION
In a post apocalyptic flooded world where everyone lives on large Navy Aircraft Carrier ships huddled together forming a city, two 14 year old twins, Alex and Ana, must live and work on a large fishing ship like slaves in a sweatshop with their half brother Leo, their friend Yumi and their roommates.

Together they must figure out a way to escape from the ship while avoiding the Tyrannical Captain of the ship and their enemy classmates Daniel and Amaia, who despise them because of their parent’s infamous reputations and anti Government beliefs, so that they can fulfill their goal of helping their parents solve a conspiracy theory about the Government that they have been secretly investigating for years.

Third Person Narrative Teenagers Saving The World If you like characters with dark/tragic backstories you’ll find that here. Along with: Sibling relationships, parents, revenge, multiple main characters, best friends, coming of age, detective work, crimes, police, Tyrannical Government, Dystopian, Violence, Murder, mystery, manipulation, grudges, guns, knives, lies, deception, deceit, slavery, freedom, betrayal, trust, blood,

Similar Stories:
(Some of these stories may be less similar than others, i.e. no fantasy elements, but they have overlapping content and themes.)
Hunger Games
Snowpiercer
Divergent
Attack On Titan
Lord Of The Flies
Battle Royale
Harry Potter
Avatar The Last Airbender
1984
The Mazerunner

Dystopian #SciFi #Drama #YA # #Postapocalptic #Futuristic #Youngadult #Darkthemes #Adultthemes #Comingofage #mystery #Series

If you've read this far down thank you :slight_smile:

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    Apr '21

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    Apr '21
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TheOddFungi
Apr '21

Here is my honest opinion and I really hope you don't take anything I say the wrong way. You can take what I say with a grain of salt as I think these have great potential, they just need a bit of polishing.

1st story:
Scale 1-10: 5
I feel like you're giving away a bit too much of your story in your description and telling us what is going to happen even if there may be a lot more to it than what you let on. It is also really long for a description. My word of advice, most people will give you maybe 15 seconds of their attention before getting bored. I'm not going to lie, I got bored, but pushed through to try and give you accurate thoughts. But also, because I already know what I assume is the main gist of the story, I'm not super interested in reading it.

Dig into your story and come up with a shorter summary that will hook in your readers. If you need an example look at the summary of my novel1 as it has a shorter summary, but instead of telling my readers the plot, I give them basic knowledge of the story and lead them to ask questions about it themselves.

Story 2:
Scale 1-10: 3 (mostly because I am not drawn to detective stories so this is just personal preference coming into play)

This one feels kind of...unorganized? In the last sentence the question brings up a tyrannical government out of nowhere. Perhaps adding into the main part of your summary why Rafael wants to go to this island will draw in more intrigue? Is he trying to find the island to get away from this government?

Story 3:
Scale 1-10: 5

This one starts off really well, and then as I was reading the next paragraph, I got lost and confused midway.

Together they must figure out a way to escape from the ship while avoiding the Tyrannical Captain of the ship and their enemy classmates Daniel and Amaia, who despise them because of their parent’s infamous reputations and anti Government beliefs, so that they can fulfill their goal of helping their parents solve a conspiracy theory about the Government that they have been secretly investigating for years.

This is a very long run-on sentence, so I would highly recommend finding a way to break it up.

Overall:
I really like that you add "similar stories" and all of the different themes. That really helps readers to narrow down if they may enjoy said book, so I may actually incorporate that myself. And I like that these stories all seem really interesting and unique.

The main issue I think is, and I don't want to offend you by asking this but, why should I care about what happens to these characters? In this regard, your 3rd story does the best at pulling on my heart and making me feel like I want to care about your characters. They're forced to work in a sweatshop and want out. In your 2nd story I don't know why I should care why Rafael wants to find the mysterious island.

Find a way to make your readers want to care about your characters and get them asking themselves about it. It's hard to do in only so many words, but this is all stuff I learned from my college writing course and years of experience, so I feel like some of it at least is helpful. I hope ^_^

joannekwan(ง ˙o˙)ว here to help~
Apr '21

Save the tropes (those long lists you put above Similar Stories) for series tags. The search bar on Tapas will pick up series tags, I don't think it draws from series descriptions. And the hashtags you have here could also be thrown into series tags.

Save the similar stories for pitching on social media and keep it to like three at most. Something like "Hunger Games meets Snowpiercer in a world like Harry Potter, (name of your novel) is a high-octane revenge story about a boy who …"

But the main meat of what could be better of your descriptions is: all of them are way too long. For webnovels, it's best to keep a description at 2 paragraphs or 1.
They also contain extraneous information that makes many of the sentences really long-winded and a chore to read through. This can especially put people off when they're quickly glancing through many series descriptions to try and find something to read.

For your first novel, is the main plot the two kids turning bad? Or is the main plot them facing the problems they've caused during quarantine? The way you've set up your summary it sounds like it could be 2 full books with each timeline. Personally, I'm most intrigued by the quarantine twist. Like there are tons of stories about people doing bad and the revenge wielded against them, but the quarantine element literally placing these kids in a situation where they can't run from the consequences of their actions is really neat! Though talking about how the story is structured is more developmental editing and I'm getting off topic I suppose.

The second story sounds interesting, but it does have the challenge of spanning such a long timeline. Maybe something like "In a flooded world, one boy has nowhere else to call home but an aircraft carrier ship. He seeks to find a mysterious island with his friends in the hopes it could be a new home, a new start, but the ship's government and a string of murders threaten to wash his dream away."
Wording could be better but I came up with that on the fly. xP

The third story sounds like a companion novel to the second one you listed (not a critique, just a comment). To focus on the summary itself, most short descriptions usually don't employ character names, rather their descriptions, like "a boy", "a seamstress". People need to be hooked almost immediately and names do little to describe characters and how they fit into the story. If you must include names, I would only do so for the protagonist, otherwise it's white noise. Like, I'm reading a description to see if I'd be into the story, why do I care that the enemy classmates are called Daniel and Amaia? So to cut down on names and some of the extra-relationship info in your third story's description, it could be:
"In a flooded world, enemies abound aboard an aircraft carrier home to tween twins seeking to escape the reach of the ship's oppressive government. While they are simple sweatshop workers, targets are on their backs as whispers fly about their parents' government conspiracy theory."

C-Gamsby
Apr '21

Be very wary of typos. If these are only for Tapas, it probably doesn't matter as much, since I think readers here care far more about the content than small typos, but you will certainly turn off some readers if they see typos on the first line of the description. Generally, you should spell out numbers if they are the first word of a sentence or under ten. Plus, you end the sentence with a comma instead of a period.